The Fields of Lemuria (23 page)

That is, until Pollard decided if he couldn’t go in, he would go up, and began pushing the double-bladed knife
up
instead of
in.

The alien feel of the cold instrument slicing into his flesh sent all kinds of sensations coursing through Keo’s body. He wanted to scream out again, but couldn’t figure out how to do it this time. Maybe it was the pain from his side, or the one from the back of his head, or the knife cutting open his face at this very moment—

“Die!” Pollard shouted. “Just fucking die already!”

“No!” Keo shouted back. “Fuck you, and fuck Joe!”

He didn’t know how he had managed that little comeback. It must have also taken Pollard by surprise, because his eyes widened even further (was that even possible?) and the brutal mask of hate and anger and fury seemed to slip.

It wasn’t for very long—maybe a
half second
—but it was long enough that Pollard briefly stopped carving Keo’s face like a jack-o’-lantern.

Now now now!

Keo let go of Pollard’s neck, pulled his arm back, and punched the man in the throat. Pollard gagged and the knife cutting into the side of Keo’s face disappeared momentarily. It was just enough time for Keo to lift his entire body slightly off the ground, twist left, and cock his right arm in the air before driving it back and smashing the elbow into the side of Pollard’s neck.

He swore he heard something break as Pollard’s entire body seemed to go slack and he toppled sideways off Keo, landing in the grass on his side. Keo rolled away, then fumbled up to his knees and looked over at Pollard, expecting the man to get right back up, too, with the knife in his fist ready to finish the job.

But Pollard was lying on the ground, his head turned at an awkward angle. His hand, still gripping the knife, twitched, as if he kept trying to move it, to strike out at Keo, but couldn’t make it obey. His eyes remained intensely focused on Keo, though, and his lips quivered but no words or sounds came out.

Keo stumbled up to his feet. Blood was flowing in rivulets out of the cut along the left side of his face. He didn’t know how deep or long the cut was, but there was enough blood to know it was just deep and long enough. He put his hand over his left side, where Pollard had knifed him earlier. His palm was instantly slick, telling him he was going to need something better to stanch the bleeding than just blood-soaked fingers.

Pollard wasn’t dead, but he looked halfway there. He might have been paralyzed. Or, at least, he didn’t appear to be breathing anymore.

Keo crouched next to the man and stared back at him. “You should have left me alone.”

Pollard’s lips quivered, but no words came out.

“I’m sorry about your son,” Keo continued. “But Joe was a piece of shit and he deserved everything he got.”

Pollard’s body trembled and his eyes snapped shut.

Keo had seen men die in worst ways than what Pollard was going through. Some of those moments were the result of his handiwork. He thought he was used to it, up close and personal, but this…

He stood up. He didn’t need or want to see this play out.

He staggered around, looking for his weapons instead. He found the MP5SD nearby and slung it with some effort, trying not to pass out when he leaned down for the submachine gun, then again when he straightened back up. He couldn’t find the Sig Sauer anywhere, but did locate the Ka-Bar after about ten seconds of looking around. If it had been any better hidden, he would never have found it. Thank God it was nearby.

He looked over when he thought Pollard might have said something. But the man was looking in the wrong direction, and whatever sound had come out of his mouth had gotten lost in the late summer heat.
If
he had said anything at all. It might have all been in Keo’s head.

“Hey,” a voice said.

That one was definitely
not
in his head.

Keo turned around, fumbling with the MP5SD. Or he thought he was. He was in so much pain, and everything had gone so numb that he could have been flexing against the air and wouldn’t have known the difference.

“You look like shit,” a short figure standing next to him said.

It was a woman. Or a girl. Definitely female.

The sun was in his eyes, so he couldn’t really make her out. She looked small and frail, or maybe the brightness of the open field was playing tricks with his mind. God knew the pain was overwhelming every single one of his senses at the moment.

“Yeah?” he managed to say.

“Yeah,” the figure said. “You gonna die now?”

“I think so,” Keo said, and fell into the grass.

He might have slammed into the ground on his face, or his cheek, or actually managed to summon forth some still-remaining sense of self-preservation and reached out with his arms to stop his fall just in time. He couldn’t really be sure, and at that moment, he didn’t really give a damn.

The ground felt warm against his face, though that could have just been the blood.

Either/or.

Thoom-thoom-thoom.

He was swimming in a fog filled with mud and pain. Throbbing, piercing pain. The kind that made you want to never open your eyes again.

Thoom-thoom-thoom.

He had no idea how long he had been asleep. The fact that he was waking up at all was a miracle. He was supposed to be dead. Right now, he wouldn’t mind a permanent—and most importantly, peaceful—rest.

Thoom-thoom-thoom.

There was that damn awful sound again. What was it? Flesh hitting wood?

Thoom-thoom-thoom.

He wished it would stop. It was bad enough he couldn’t breathe without feeling like his ribcage was going to implode. Keo had been shot, stabbed, and at one point almost paralyzed before, but no one had ever tried to cut off his face with a five-inch blade. That was a new one.

Thoom-thoom-thoom.

“Goddammit,” he said out loud.

“Relax,” a female voice said. The woman from earlier, who had appeared out of nowhere after his little dust-up with—

Pollard.

Dead now. Keo had broken his neck. Snapped a vertebrae or two (or three) and cut off his breathing. It was a hell of a way to go, and Keo didn’t feel the least bit sorry for the guy. Well, maybe just a little bit.

No one told you to chase me through half of Louisiana, asshole.

He opened his eyes to semidarkness. Thin slivers of moonlight pierced pieces of furniture that had been upended against a window at the back of the room. A metal filing cabinet, chairs stacked on top of one another, and a sofa. There was no real order, as if whoever had put the barricade together simply shoved as much as they could find against the opening and hoped for the best.

Thoom-thoom-thoom!

The figure leaning over him looked concerned. Stringy blonde hair fell across an oval-shaped face and brown eyes that still managed to look bright in the dark room. “You really lost a lot of blood. I didn’t think you’d make it.”

Keo couldn’t move. He didn’t want to move, either. Every rise and fall of his chest sent a stabbing pain from the tip of his toes all the way up to his damp head. He felt the chill of medical ointment over the left side of his face, which was now covered in a strip of bandage. A long strip of bandage. He didn’t want to touch it, because that would tell him just how long it really was.

Maybe Gillian will like it. Scars add character, right?

“Where am I?” he asked. His voice sounded muffled, like he was talking through a mouthful of cotton.

Thanks for the broken nose, Pollard.

He could feel the break at the bridge of his nose, but it didn’t really hurt. He wasn’t entirely sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing.

“Inside one of the offices in the first building,” the woman
(girl)
said. “We dragged you in here. Brian wanted to shoot you, but I talked him out of it.”

“We should have shot him,” a male voice said from somewhere in the background. “That was Pollard’s order.”

“Pollard’s dead,” the girl said sharply. Despite her age, she was clearly in charge. “Nothing he says matters anymore. He’s the one who dragged us down here from Corden in the first place. Rupert’s dead because of him, too.”

Rupert.

The kid who had been patrolling with Fiona when he stumbled across them yesterday. (Or was that two days ago? He was losing track of the days again…) The last time he saw the teenager, he was keeling over after getting shot in the gut by his own people.

Which would make the girl Georgette.

“We found him and his sister hiding in a cellar near Corden,”
Fiona had said.
“They’d been there since all of this began.”

The teenager gave him a half-smile. It wasn’t completely friendly, but it was far from malevolent. “Stitching you up is becoming a habit, mister. What kind of name is Keo, anyway?”

“Gary was taken,” he said. Then, “You’ve done this before?”

“What’s that? Stitch you up?”

“Yes.”

“I’m the one who sewed your head back together last night. That means I’ve saved your life twice now.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

Thoom-thoom-thoom.

He had forgotten about the creatures outside the office, but they hadn’t forgotten about them. Keo looked over as much of the room as he could from his supine angle on the floor. It was one of the offices near the front of the building. He recognized it because he and Norris had gone through all of them the first day they arrived at the park. The door was locked down with a large oak desk and a pile of furniture behind it. From the clothes and boxes of supplies lying around, he guessed that at one point there had been more people in here. Until last night, anyway.

Thoom-thoom-thoom.

The legs of the desk were pointing back at him, the flat top pressed against the doorframe. The heavy furniture quivered each time the creatures smashed into the door from the other side, but it held, thanks to chairs and an old white sofa shoved against it as additional reinforcement.

Thoom-thoom-thoom.

He and Georgette weren’t alone in the room. Besides Brian, the man
(boy)
whose voice Keo had heard earlier, there were two other women. The oldest looked to be in her twenties with short hair. She sat huddled in one corner, arms thrown over her knees, staring at the floor. If it were possible, she would have merged with the wall at her back. Her entire body fidgeted in tune to the
thoom-thoom-thoom!

The fourth person in the room was Brian and Georgette’s age. They were all teenagers, though they looked older these days. They had grown up fast, but their youth still peeked through the dirt and anxiety, even in the darkened room.

Brian sat next to the window, clutching an AR-15. Blue eyes pierced the darkness back at Keo. The attempt at intimidation was there, but the kid didn’t have it in him to make it work. He was the only one in the room wearing a gun belt and black clothes. Georgette, along with the other two girls, was in cargo pants and a T-shirt. All four
(five)
of them were slicked with sweat inside the sealed room.

Thoom-thoom-thoom.

He was lying on some kind of blanket. He wasn’t surprised to see his gun belt, MP5SD, and Ka-Bar knife (still in its sheath) resting in a pile next to Brian. They had also taken his watch for some reason.

“What time is it?” Keo asked.

“Does it matter?” Georgette said. “It’s night.”

Keo didn’t press the question. She was right. It didn’t matter. Night was night, and when darkness came,
they
came…

A sudden rush of pain made him clench his teeth.

“Here,” Georgette said as she took out something from her pocket. She reached down and pulled his head up from the floor.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Something for the pain.”

He opened his mouth and let her deposit the octagon-shaped pill onto his tongue. He eagerly swallowed it.

Pain, pain, go away…

She laid him back down. “You really lost a lot of blood.”

“You mentioned that…”

“What I mean is, you’re probably not going to live through the night.”

He somehow managed to smile up at her.

She looked back at him, confused. “Why are you smiling? I just told you you’re probably going to die before morning.”

Gillian,
he thought, but was unable to turn her name into actual sounds. Instead, he closed his eyes and went to sleep. Either the pill was having an effect, or the pain was becoming unbearable.

Either/or.

He didn’t particularly care which one it was. Sleep was sleep. And right now he needed as much of it as he could get, even with the bloodsuckers knocking on the window and door, trying to get in at them.

Keep at it, boys. Keep right on at it.

I’m gonna go to sleep for a bit while you keep on keeping on…

*

“I didn’t kill
your brother,” Keo said a few hours later.